


Advent Past I

by Tammany



Series: Assorted Advent Stories, Christmas 2014, All-sorts, some connected. [15]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Advent Past, Backstory, Character Study, Christmas, F/M, Songfic, theme song
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-10
Updated: 2014-12-10
Packaged: 2018-02-28 21:43:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2748137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ok, sometimes ideas just cascade. This is a cascade day.</p><p>This story takes place a year before Sherlock's return. His hair is not as grown out as we see it in "The Empty Hearse," but to get the dreads he's sporting when he's taken captive it seemed likely he'd been letting his hair grow out prior to that point. So Sherlock has shoulder-length dreads in this. This is the bombing in Warsaw that Mycroft and he mention in "Advent XIV". </p><p>The song, to me, is one of Sherlock's defining songs: it's titled "Ghost Story," and it's by Sting. It's haunting, but it's also powerfully rational and intellectual--and it takes on the way we lie to ourselves about our love. This is Sherlock and Mycroft to me--but also Sherlock and almost every other single person he cares for. Mainly it's Sherlock and denial.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Advent Past I

**Nota Bene:** If you want to follow the music or the lyrics referenced, the music can be found [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uw97ZO2BoQs) and the lyrics [here](http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/sting/ghoststory.html).

 

Christmas, 2013, Warsaw

“Stay still,” the Duckling growled, dabbing at Sherlock’s forehead with a peroxide-soaked flannel. “God, you’re lucky. Hardly any cuts at all, and the worst is just going to leave a tiny beauty mark over one brow. I’ve seen plastic surgery with less style and precision.”

Sherlock sniffed and winced as she cleaned his wounds. “You are too obsessed with appearances,” he said. “Always costumes, always disguises.”

“Hardly,” she drawled, amused.

His eyes flashed dark as he remembered.

She had beautiful skin…miles and miles of beautiful skin.

The memories moved darkly between them as she daubed on antiseptic ointment and covered the little triangular gash with a sticking plaster. She leaned over and laid her lips on his brow. “There—kissed the owie better,” she said, her dry, sophisticated irony transposing the innocence into the key of seduction.

They had slept together the night he’d saved her. They had slept together since.

They did not consider themselves lovers. That was something different. They were contestants, combatants, challengers crossing swords in hungry desire for victory—over each other, over their bodies, over each other’s bodies, over desire itself.

“Why a bomb?” she asked, unbuttoning his shirt. Her fingers dallied, her perfectly manicured nails traced arabesques over his chest. “On Christmas Eve.”

“Consider it a family tradition.”

Both knew what he was saying. Sherlock had lived the years of broken holidays, of hurt relations, of the Christmas dream shattered. Irene had merely researched them, with the help of Moriarty—but she knew. She knew about the morning he’d arrived at his parents' house mere minutes short of going into drug-fueled convulsions, and on waking in hospital had reared from his bed to slap his brother’s cold, still face. She knew about the year he’d run away, and the year he’d made the national headlines, streaking stark naked down Pall Mall shouting “Happy Christmas, Mikey!” as he passed his brother’s flat.

“I take it your brother knows, then.”

“Course he knows,” Sherlock said. “It’s what we do instead of Christmas cards.”

“It’s what you do. What does he do?”

“Sends his minions around to make sure I didn’t shoot my arse off in the process of sending him Season's Greetings,” he said, and moved to shift her from her line of questioning, trailing his fingers delicately up her inner arm, breathing softly into her ear, mouthing the curved column of her long, swanlike neck.

He knew what he was doing. He’d studied long before the night he’d first lain with her in Islamabad, determined she would have nothing to teach him that he didn’t already know. He’d failed—there was always something, and in that case the “something” had been that the sum of sex exceeded the tally of the separate parts. Application differed from theory, and she was proficient in the art of applied desire.

He was more skilled now. She shivered under his caress, and retaliated, long nails scraping softly up the inseam of his trousers, sliding teasingly over the mound of his rousing prick. “Changing the subject,” she hissed, then gasped as he cupped her breast.

Their relationship was complicated, existing outside either of their norms: each the exception that proved the other’s rules.

“I don’t need you,” she said, calm even as she panted. “I don’t want you,” she added, but it wasn’t a rejection, just a point of fact.

“No,” he husked. “Nor I you.” Though his body rose to her challenge—challenges of mind as much as body, of instinct as much as intellect.

“I don’t love you,” she said.

“No. Nor I you.”

They both lied. They both told the truth. They were old friends with paradox.

Each drove the other up the long, steep hill of arousal, pitting skill against reserve, knowledge against distaste, biology against intellect. They were able lovers, wicked in their clever touches, cruel in their teasing caresses. In the end, as they both shouted out their shared climax, they both won—and both lost.

“Happy Christmas,” the Duckling said, after, sprawled on the bed, panting.

“And many happy returns of the season,” he gasped back.

“I don’t usually celebrate Christmas,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “Nor I.”

She rolled over and leaned on her elbow. “No, you don’t,” she said. “You desecrate, instead. Why?”

“So false,” he said, staring at the ceiling. “All that love and happiness. Pure fiction, of course. Did you know that both murders and suicides are most common during the holidays? Well, after heat waves,” he amended. “It rather puts the lie to it all, though. There are no happy families.”

She considered, then said, “No. I think it’s that you know it’s all true, and don’t know what to do with it without admitting you’re as vulnerable as the rest of them.”

He glared at her. “I don’t have to stay,” he said.

She smiled and shrugged, comfortably indifferent. “Stay or go. What you will.”

He growled, and rolled onto his stomach, burying his face in his arms.

“You can’t hide,” she said.

“Why would I want to? The worst you can say is I’m human….and that’s never been in question.”

She smiled a clever cat smile. “I found something for you,” she said. “Consider it a Christmas present.” She flowed off the bed, sliding elegantly across the room to her iPod dock. She flickered through the menu until she found the song she was looking for. She set the iPod back in the dock, and murmured, “Philosopher, know thyself,” and began the music—then left the room.

Because, in the end, she was kinder that she would ever admit, and she knew how it would end.

The music began, hauting and delicate, with Sting’s edgy, reedy tenor summoning ghosts…

_I watch the western sky;_

_The sun is sinking._

_The geese are flying south;_

_It sets me thinking…_

He frowned, but Sherlock was a musician, and he understood both the brooding, mournful melodic line and the precision of the lyric. It was a complex piece, worthy of actual intellectual consideration. Not much popular music could be held to represent an internal argument with thesis, antithesis, postulate and evidence, the slow establishment of a body of proof. A man on the edge of winter’s fall argued with himself about who he really was—what he really felt, rather than what he’d always told himself.

He shivered, as memories stirred and rose up to haunt him. John, shaking his spirit. Mrs. Hudson, who wrapped his heart in warmth and gave him love without unsettling complexity. Mummy and Father.  Mycroft….

_Why was I missing then_

_That whole December_

_I give my usual line:_

_I don’t remember._

He’d run away, between the end of Michaelmas Term and the start of Hillary. He’d gone to ground, knowing Mycroft hunted him through the hells of London, determined to evade him. He had been angry, and hadn’t known why.

No—he knew why. Mycroft had been in love that year, for the first, last, and only time, and had barely noted Sherlock during the holidays, sending emails to his lover and waiting eternally for phone calls. Mummy and Father had been horrified, fascinated, appalled, hopeful, fearful. Their gay son had a lover…

Of course he’d run away, Sherlock thought, pushing his face tight against the pillow. And of course Mycroft had searched for him; of course Mycroft had found him. Of course they’d fought like angry cats in a wet sack.

_And all these differences_

_A cloak I borrow_

_We kept our distances;_

_Why should it follow “I must have loved you”?_

They’d parted on bad terms, and reconnected in competitive fury when Sherlock had been recruited for a mission Mycroft was now too old to attempt, underground in Cambridge. Sherlock had reveled in doing what his brother could not. Mycroft had reveled in saving him when he got in too deep.

“I hate you,” Sherlock had snarled.

“Consider it mutual,” Mycroft had snapped back, and walked away, straight and righteous and perfect in every line and gesture. He’d lost his lover, by then, and had turned to ice. Even Sherlock couldn’t find the traces of the boy who had been.

Three years lost in drugged anger. Three years taking whatever MI6 tossed him and proving, over and over again, that it didn’t matter if he was floating on a fuchsia cloud of cocaine or not, he could solve the puzzles and thread the mazes. All of it summed up by the final line, when he’d been met by his brother, and the MI5 agent Mycroft had found for Sherlock to work with.

“His name is Lestrade,” Mycroft had said, picking invisible lint from an already too-perfect sleeve. “He’s embedded in the Met. He just made DI. Considering the way you’ve been pestering their detectives, you might want a stable contact.”

“I’m a consulting detective,” Sherlock had growled, sprawled and at a disadvantage in the cheap bedsit he’d found on Montague Street. “They let me work with them because I’m that good. I don’t need a contact.”

“Everyone needs a contact,” Mycroft had replied, prim and certain. “He’s good. You will like him.”

Sherlock was never sure then or after whether it was a prediction or a command. Either way, Mycroft was right. As always.

And, as always, his rightness had mattered, trapping Sherlock between loving his new contact and hating him—between trusting him and guarding himself. Lestrade—his friend. His mentor. His brother’s choice of handler. He never saw Lestrade without seeing the ghost of Mycroft: his perfect, distant brother.

He’d run away to find Mycroft, years before. Mycroft had searched until he found Sherlock—and they’d been lost to each other ever since.

_You were my compass star_

_You were my measure_

_You were a pirate’s map—_

_A buried treasure._

_If this was all correct_

_The last thing I’d expect!_

_The prosecution rests._

_It’s time that I confessed: I must have loved you._

“You’re going to be all right?” the Duckling said when he came out of her bedroom, fresh from the shower. She was curled in her swan-white satin robe on the sofa. She cradled a brandy snifter in her palms, eyes haunted.

“Of course I’ll be all right,” he said, buttoning the last button on his shirt. He shrugged into his jacket. She’d shaken the shards of glass out of its folds earlier, beating the wool with a broom on the little balcony of her elegant flat. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“No reason,” she said, her voice empty. “After all, nothing important has happened.”

“Nothing at all,” he said, and pushed a bomb and an orgasm and a haunted burst of melancholy tears aside. He smiled, tightly, and shook out his shoulder-length dreads. “I’m off to Venice, next, I think. Anything to pass on to our contacts there?”

She shook her head, and gazed out the window at the lights of the city below. “No,” she said. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

**Author's Note:**

> As an end comment:
> 
> Regarding Irene, Sherlock, and their relationship, physical and otherwise. I choose to go with them being as complex and conflicted as Moffat, Cumberbatch, and Pulver have described them. Sherlock does "fancy her." He also is most attracted to her mind and her cleverness--and her own attraction to intelligence above and beyond her natural lesbian orientation. She is absolutely a lesbian--but she's also a professional in the sex trade, and while as a dominatrix she would seldom have to "put out," she appears to indulge, enjoying mastery even when she's not aligned with her own orientation. (wry grin) One of the great secrets of sexuality in the modern era is that most people can climax with non-optimal partners or at non-optimal times. Most of sex is in the mind and in the nerves. Satisfy those and any number of mis-matches can be at least temporarily overlooked.
> 
> I go with Cumberbatch's theory that the two did indeed have sex after his rescue of her at the end of ASiB. I choose to believe that, as Cumberbatch theorizes, Sherlock goes in intellectually armed and ready--he does his homework before he attempts sex. I also choose to suggest that regardless of Cumberbatch's hopes, a novice remains a novice. Theory and practice are not identical.
> 
> I have tried to write two people who absolutely do and absolutely do not love and desire each other. Both are true--and both are often true at exactly the same times. It is not an ideal or even a very romantic relationship--but to me it feels plausible, and poignant, and true to both characters in their complexity.


End file.
